ICE Cool: A Brief History of Car Audio

For most of automotive history, there was no such thing as car audio. For the first sixty years or so, it was simply a matter of bringing a portable, battery-powered AM radio along for the ride. Yet by the nineteen sixties, exotic cars, from Ferraris to Rolls-Royces, came with the option of pre-fitted, purpose-built car radios, and there were even dash-mounted, slide-out 45 RPM record players available too. 

By the early 1970s, 8-track tape players also began to appear in high-end cars – they were a popular option in Jensen Interceptors of that era, for example. These clunky devices used large tape cartridges that offered sketchy sound quality and very basic track search capabilities, which meant they were soon replaced by smaller, easier-to-use Compact Cassette players.

By the middle of the decade, these were beginning to bring music to the motoring masses, and at the same time, car radios began to get FM stereo functionality. By 1976, it was possible to specify a standard family saloon like a Ford Cortina with a factory-fit stereo radio/cassette player – and what was called ‘ICE’ (In-Car Entertainment) suddenly became a thing.

This drive to bring music to the car-owning public was aided enormously by the introduction of the German ‘DIN’ standard for car radio fitment, which soon opened up the market. This organisation – called Deutsches Institut für Normung – set the international template for car audio, making it far easier to swap out basic AM radios for fancy stereo radio/cassette decks.

Car audio electrical looms also got DIN certification, as did speaker sizes – and suddenly the car audio boom was here. It was later incorporated in 1984 by the International Standardisation Organisation, as ISO 7736 in 1984. It meant that every new car sold had a two-inch-high, seven-inch-wide slot, or a twice-depth version called Double-DIN.

GOLDEN YEARS

The early eighties saw a further explosion in aftermarket car audio, and practically every town’s High Street had a shop to fit cars with shiny new audio goodies. Manufacturers were by now fitting radios as standard in new cars, often badged as their own products, but these were invariably low quality due to the savage markups in the car parts supply chain.

These were called OEM, or Original Equipment by Manufacturer, but weren’t usually up to much and many people seemed happy to spend big bucks on upgrading them at car audio specialists.

All of which proved great business for the likes of Alpine, Blaupunkt, Clarion, Kenwood, Pioneer, and the rest, who dutifully provided far better-sounding products for less money than OEM designs. This, in turn, sparked a massive bout of theft from cars, as unscrupulous types broke into them and stole their sound systems.

We all paid for this in our motor insurance premiums, sadly – and it continued right up to the new millennium. To help deter theft, the removable face plate that you could take with you was invented.

As every new year came and went, in-car entertainment products got crazier – or so it seemed. Head units offered more features, amplifiers more power, speakers more drive units, ad infinitum. Panasonic even launched a 5.1 channel surround head unit with a centre speaker fixed to the front.

It was a tiny two-inch middle-tweeter and it was motorised to open and flip 180 degrees when powered up. It was called ‘Katana’ and there was a ridiculous, tiny ‘schwing’ sound that came out of it as it opened!

However, these crazy days were not to last. As one expert named Wells, of Fulham Palace Road in London – a man who fitted hi-fi to Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart and Vangelis’ cars – said at the time, “the car makers will take this away from us one day”. He was right.

LOUD AND PROUD

Moving into the nineties, the widespread availability of MOSFET power output devices meant that car stereos became louder yet more affordable. Whereas a good Pioneer head unit of the early eighties put out 10 or so watts per channel, by the turn of the century, you could buy one for half its price with four times the power output.

At the same time, people became very interested in subwoofers, which further added to in-car sound pressure levels. The emerging trend for huge quantities of bass in cars created a divide between car audio fans bigger than any audiophile arguments about the merits of analogue versus digital.

Many car audio addicts were ridiculed for their obsession with bass and/or sheer volume levels, invariably by those who privileged sound quality over quantity. Literal decibel dragsters appeared, with competitions to get the highest possible volume levels – some reaching around 185dB, with 160dB being normal.

To this day, these enthusiasts still meet for pan-European competitions featuring the world’s best-sounding cars, equipped with the most expensive and esoteric components.

Phatt Audio Concepts in Melbourne, Australia is at the forefront of custom automotive high-end installations.

In the first decade of the new millennium, some of this began to rub off on ultra-high-end car manufacturers. Sensing that in-car audio was another chance to up-sell their customers, they began to add bespoke high-end audio systems to their options lists. Alpine radios appeared in Lamborghinis, whereas Aston Martins featured Alpine head units with the option of amplifiers and speakers by the British high-end audio specialist Linn.

Bentley offered an extremely expensive ‘Naim for Bentley’ sound system option. Jaguar offered premium Bowers & Wilkins speaker packages on its top cars, too. As Vangelis’ car audio fitter predicted, the automakers were ‘taking back control’ of in-car entertainment – and making a tidy profit in the process.

Car makers getting into bed with specialist hi-fi companies has resulted in a serious step-change. Alpine used to fly journalists in from all around the world to Japan, to show off its thermal shock chamber – where its products were subjected to minus 30°C air and then near-boiling hot air soon after. We could see them still playing happily, despite the insane temperature change.

They had massive sun lamps to overheat them, and robots dropping them to show how shockproof they were. But as auto makers made audio as integral to cars as the HVAC system, all of this disappeared – car audio is built-in to the design from the beginning, many years before the launch. Full-size mock-up models are made, and rolling roads are used to measure internal cabin noise and show how to control it. Detailed acoustic mapping is done by specialist loudspeaker designers.

In 2025, car audio is pretty much indivisible from the car itself – it’s a subsystem that’s networked to the car’s electronic brain, and built to interface with the driver’s smartphone via Bluetooth to Apple CarPlay, or similar. Even budget cars come with sound systems of unimaginable sophistication compared to basic factory-fit, single-DIN OEM solutions, such as the Ford push-button radio fitted to a late-seventies Cortina.

In-car entertainment has developed at least as fast as cars themselves – but is now largely a matter for the car’s maker rather than its owner. The added value is obvious – prestigious hi-fi brand names emblazoned on car speaker grilles give serious bragging rights.

In a world of largely undifferentiated cars, the quality of the sound system often plays a key role in people’s purchasing decisions. We have come a long way from perching Roberts radios on the parcel shelves of 1963 Austin Cambridges, that’s for sure.

Continue the Discussion

Did You Know?

The early foundations of StereoNET can be traced back to 1999 as the publisher of Australia's leading independent publication, Car Audio Australia. The digital publication delivered the latest news, reviews and information on aftermarket car audio, as well as providing industry training, much in the same way that CEDIA operates in the audio-visual market today.

The organisation went on to train judges and organise sound quality and Bass Battle competitions across Australia and New Zealand, along with training judges operating at a national level. Many of the readers of that publication are still active members of StereoNET today. "CAA" even set a long standing 'Sound Pressure Level' Australian record which stood for many years.